Well, Queen Elizabeth will not be attending COP26 on doctor’s advice, we still haven’t heard if China has changed its mind and will attend, and we learned earlier this week that the US may be attending weakened if Sen. Joe Manchin and other Democrats agree not to tax methane in the BBB legislation.
The Atlantic reports the loss of the methane tax is not nearly as “apocalyptic” as the removal of the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), which mandated carbon reductions.
This is particularly embarrassing because the US and the UK authored the Pledge to Slash Methane Emissions, which 30 countries agreed to following September’s UNGA.
Methane, while it only remains in the atmosphere for around ten years, is “at least 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Even a comparative smidgen of methane can despoil the climate,” The Atlantic reports.
That’s bad enough, but since 2013, annual global methane emissions have accelerated by 50 percent. Last year saw the biggest jump in methane concentrations on record. At least some of this spike seems to have come from fossil-fuel operations—especially oil and natural-gas infrastructure. That’s partially because the fossil-fuel concoction that we call “natural gas” is about 94 percent methane. (If you turn on a burner on your gas stove, methane comes out.) As North America and Europe have shifted their energy mix to favor natural gas over the past decade, the potential for large methane leaks has increased.
The Other Methane
In a Guardian article Going vegan: can switching to a plant-based diet really save the planet? authors report varying statistics on how a plant based diet can influence climate change, with some studies showing vegetarian diets would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions per person by 3% while others reveal a reduction in emissions per person of 20-30% by cutting meat consumption in half.
“Probably the most important thing to point out is that emissions are often viewed as the only metric of sustainability: they are not. Impacts of farming systems on carbon sequestration, soil acidification, water quality, and broader ecosystem services also need to be well considered,” said Matthew Harrison, systems modeling team leader at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture.
Environmental writer George Monbiot believes the variance in the studies is attributable to what was measured. “There are two completely different ways look at the carbon impact of diet: one is carbon released by producing this or that food – that is ‘carbon current account’. But another one is ‘carbon capital account’, which is the carbon opportunity cost of producing this food rather than another one,” he said.
“If you are producing meat, for example, what might land be used for if you took meat away? If you are growing forests there instead or peat bog there.”
“Most of what you can do at an individual level is weak by comparison to what governments need to do … but changing diet does not. That has a major impact,” he said.
“It is easier done if the government acts to change the food system but in the absence of that, we should still try and change our diets.”
“Veganism is on the rise big-time in the United Kingdom and the United States, says University of Sussex Professor of international development Benjamin Selwyn. “In the U.K., the number of vegans has increased from around half a million in 2016 to more than 3.5 million today. In the U.S. approximately 2.5 percent of the population is vegan.”
Survey Finds Most Americans Support Climate Policies in BBB agenda.
The nationwide poll found 55% of Americans support a type of clean energy standard that would decrease the use of fossil fuels and increase the use of renewable energy, according to the survey of adults by The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
COP News
Updated climate commitments ahead of COP26 summit fall far short, but net-zero pledges provide hope
New and updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) shave a mere 7.5% off anticipated 2030 emissions, according to the UNEP Emissions Report. A 55% reduction is needed to achieve 1.5 degrees C. Currently, as the pledges stand, the world will warm by at least 2.7 degrees C this century.
The writers in Climate Brief work to keep the Daily Kos community informed and engaged with breaking news about the climate crisis around the world while providing inspiring stories of environmental heroes, opportunities for direct engagement, and perspectives on the intersection of climate activism with spirituality, politics, and the arts.